After Adam is a prosimetrum, a story told in prose and verse. Mortality is its theme. Populated by rabbis, storytellers, mystics, poets, travelers and philosophers, this Abrahamic saga in 54 chapters begins with the creation of the human and closes with the death of Moses. "Wieder's genre-bending work recenters the personal bond between the Jewish people and their intimacy-seeking God in one of the most invigorating Jewish books of recent years." —Michal Leibowitz, Review of After Adam , June 4, 2020, The Lehrhaus "Laurance Wieder is one of the great living poets who will not let the Divine die. He lives in all of us, in this book, in a dark time."--David Shapiro "After Adam should be in every synagogue pew beside the Chumash, in every church pew, in every poetry pew.... Besides, it should disrupt the ongoing conventional consensus on what poetry needs to be today...."--David Rosenberg "A work that instructs, intrigues, and entertains."--Alan Wearne Book of the Year: After Adam: The Books of Moses I don't know a lot about Larry Wieder's antecedents, but that's no constraint on the imagination. Perhaps among his ancestors there was a curious figure, maybe a distant cousin of Elijah of Vilna, "The Genius," unmentioned by Martin Buber and other chroniclers of the Hasidic sages: hard to pin down, neither a founder nor a follower of any school. His entire body of work--poetry, prose, combinations of the two, as in After Adam: The Five Books of Moses --violates fashionable prohibitions against worship. A jester is not incapable of praise. John Wilson, "A Year of Reading: 2019," First Things : 11.29.19 About The Last Century :"Wieder keeps his readers on their toes: his jokes are the epitaphs of an intense emotion, his puns are invested with a kind of theological longing." --David Lehman"Larry Wieder is one of the handful of Americans writing now who makes poetry seem like a good idea." --Peter Schjeldahl About Words to God's Music "This book is a sublime and unforgettable achievement. I stand in awe of its brilliance." --Paul Auster"[Wieder] is totally articulate about the things that matter most. An ideal poet, in fact, his ego invisible, his vision clear, with nothing between him and his God but the bright blue sky." --Tom Disch Laurance Wieder's writings include  The Last Century: Selected Poems ;  Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms ;  The Poets' Book of Psalms ;  Perek Shirah: A Chapter of Song ; and  Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible . His poems and essays have appeared in  The New Yorker ,  Scripsi ,  Books & Culture ;  The Weekly Standard ;  First Things , and elsewhere.